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Clara Barton Missing Soldiers Office Museum

Located on 7th Street, NW, the third floor contains the restored rooms and items related to when Clara Barton lived at this location during and immediately after the Civil War. She used this property not only as her residence, but also to store the supplies she received for her work on battlefields, and later as an office to handle correspondence concerning missing soldiers. In 1865, Barton hired a staff and opened the "Office of Correspondence with the Friends of the Missing Men of the United States Army" in this building. Barton took up the cause of grieving parents, family and friends whose husbands, sons, brothers, and neighbors were missing. She responded to over 63,000 letters, most of which required some kind of research that eventually lead to published lists of the names of the missing. Anyone with knowledge of their whereabouts or death could contact Barton. By the time the office closed in 1868, she and her staff had identified the fate of over 22,000 men. Clara Barton's Missing Soldiers Office went covered up for 130 years and was rediscovered by Richard Lyons of the General Services Administration in 1996, when the building was scheduled for demolition. "I have an almost complete disregard of precedent, and a faith in the possibility of something better. It irritates me to be told how things have always been done. I defy the tyranny of precedent." - Clara Barton (1821 - 1912)